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Your Email Subject Lines Matter

By October 7, 2013December 29th, 2016No Comments

Today, approximately 144.6 billion emails will be sent worldwide. That’s a lot of emails and according to Pingdom, 68 percent will be spam and caught by your spam filter and another 61 percent of those emails will be considered nonessential proving the point, your email subject lines matter.

I was reminded of this last week.

I sent out an email to my list about my newest podcast show being ready for review.

The subject line I used said, “Increase your sales…for real!”

Sounds a little spammy doesn’t it? You would think I would know better since I blogged about spammy emails. You can read that blog here.

But emails with similar email subject lines go out all day every day and probably with the same dismal results.

Here are the stats from that email campaign.

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Not the open rates or click-through rates (CTRs) I was looking for and my audience overlooked the email.

That day, my email fell among the 61 percent of emails considered nonessential.

I sent out another email the same day.

The content was very similar, but I changed the subject headline to “Pretty, pretty, please?”

What a difference an email subject line makes.

Your Email Subject Line Matters - The Marketing Stylist Lsa N. Alexander

My unique open rate more than doubled and same goes for the click-through rate.

Much better.

A/B Test Your Email Campaigns

A/B testing is creating multiple versions of your email (or any campaign for that fact) to see which one gets the better response from your audience members. Whichever sample has the better result is the campaign you use.

Do we as small business owners always do this? No.

Should we? Definitely.

Some email clients even make it real easy to conduct A/B testing of all your email campaigns.

A few of my clients use MailChimp and they offer A/B testing. When you’re creating a campaign just select A/B Split.

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If you’re looking for higher open rates and want higher click-through rates, start with a great email subject line because they do matter. Make it a priority rather than an afterthought.

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